Page 43 of A Promise of Peridot
“Hey!” I scrambled from the grass beneath me. “Where are you going? What do you mean?”
He didn’t turn as he headed across the courtyard, bougainvillea and full, plump peonies cascading around him. “I can’t teach you anything if you haven’t the spirit to fight. And I’ve heard Azurine has a delicacy made with giant clams that I’ve been hankering to try.”
“Dagan.” I tugged on his sleeve. “Stop.”
He whirled around with more speed than I anticipated, and I had to remind myself that he was the fittest elderly man I’d evermet. Maybe who had ever lived. He stared into my eyes for so long I became self-conscious and tried not to fidget.
“For someone so concerned about staying with her kin, have you thought of what your resignment might do to them?”
A wave of guilt slammed into me even as I said, “No. I mean, Ryder, Leigh, even Mari... They’re fine.”
The brief disappointment that flitted across Dagan’s hazel eyes cut deeper than a dagger. “Is it not cruel to make them suffer because they care for you?”
I fought the way my face wanted to crumple, how my limbs wanted to give out and reunite me with the ground at my feet. “I’m not making anyone suffer.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Stop answering me with questions. What if I don’t want to take care of everyone else anymore? I just want to be alone. To be free for a little while before it’s all over. Is that so wrong?”
“So staying behind while Kane and Mari travel without you is freedom now? Lonely, isolated, simply waiting for death? Wishing for it?”
“Dagan, will you drop it? I just don’t want to go. I—”
But he stepped closer. “Forcing everyone to abandon you because you are too cowardly to do it for them? Pushing and prodding, until they choose to—”
“Stop it,” I bit out, louder than I intended. Two birds flew from the cypress tree that bathed us in shade. For a moment all I could hear were my rushed breaths and water gurgling from distant fountains.
Dagan regarded me with curiosity. “When you first arrived at Shadowhold, Griffin, Kane, and I each tried our best to keep you at arm’s length. Do you know why?”
“Because you’re a curmudgeon, Kane was trying not to get in my pants—unsuccessfully, might I add—and Griffin doesn’t like people?”
Dagan stared at me in utter silence. He was making it impossible to keep the conversation away from pesky, painful emotions.
“No,” I conceded. “I don’t.”
“Only the three of us knew what you were destined for. We knew how painful it would be to one day tell you of your fate. How both realms were counting on you: a twenty-year-old girl from a small Amber town, with the weight of the world on her scrawny shoulders.”
I swallowed the lump that had lodged in my throat.
“We did not want to be vulnerable.”
My heart twisted for him—for the man who had lost his wife and daughter and didn’t want to let anyone else in. Kane and Griffin had also lost their families at Lazarus’s hand. Suddenly, Griffin’s difficulties around Mari, and people in general, seemed cloaked in tragedy.
“Just asyouare avoiding leaving Citrine for fear of what the voyage may make you want. I told you once there is power in harnessing your fear. There is also power in vulnerability. It is what makes us human, and gives us something worth fighting for. Sometimes, that is also something worth dying for.”
I rubbed at my neck. “I can’t let myself want to live, Dagan. I can’t turn my back on the prophecy. As you said, look at all the people that are counting on me.”
“I know how frightening it is to allow yourself to want something you know you can never have. Sometimes, we tell ourselves that it’s easier not to care at all.”
I folded my arms and looked out toward the sea in the fardistance. I tried to be there in my mind. All alone. An island. Where I wouldn’t have to face any of this.
“But there is power in hope too. You have no real knowledge of what is in store for you. It’s a long and winding road for all of us, prophecy or not. Do not spend what little time you may have left in this world shutting yourself out of it.”
“I can’t—” I heaved in a shuddering sigh. I hadn’t realized I was out of air. “I can’t be weak anymore. I was weak and afraid my whole life. It feels better to accept my destiny, to be strong.”
“Admitting you do not want this fate doesn’t make you the same timid girl you were when you arrived in Shadowhold.”
“Well, that’s not how I feel,” I said, my eyes finding the blades of verdant grass beneath my shoes. “I’d rather just keep my head down and move through each day until it’s time to do what I need to.”
